The Blondes (22 page)

“Grace—” I said, feeling her name catch in my throat. “Where’s Karl?”

“Hazel.” She unwound her scarf from her temples and hung it over her chair back. She looked at me again with a kind of question in her eyes, as if waiting for me to confirm who I was.

I nodded and, like her, set my teacup down.

Grace leaned back, rocking in the chair. It made that soft, hazy sound that it makes when I sit here, gliding and talking to you. You know the one.

“Hazel, Karl’s dead,” she said, and the chair went
swoosh, shush, swoosh
.

Grace wouldn’t tell me how it happened. There was part of me that didn’t believe her. You have to understand, I wanted to cry right then and there. But how do you cry about someone else’s husband in front of her? Especially when you have no facts. We sat in silence. The wood stove creaked and popped, and the chair swooshed and shushed, and Grace sipped loudly.

“Too many people have died from this,” I told her, as if trying to justify the expression on my face, or that my eyes were gleaming.

“A relative? Someone close to you?”

I nodded.

“That’s a real shame.”

Swoosh, shush, swoosh
went her chair. Karl and I had necked in it, awkwardly. At the cabin almost everything had been
awkward; it was not like being high in his office with him.

I remember I asked Grace again how Karl had died, but she didn’t answer.

She rubbed at the wooden arms of the chair. “Maybe I could paint this ivory,” she said. She patted the cushions. A little bit of dust sprang out of them. Karl’s dust. Skin cells of Karl’s that had been shed and left there. “When this thing has passed I could have these reupholstered. I think about these things here. There’s not much else to think about.” Grace ran the same hand that had thumped the cushions over her nubby scalp. Her eyes were like polished glass. “You look tired. Maybe you’d like to lie down,” she said to me, not unkindly.

I thanked her and said if she didn’t mind, that would be very nice. She pointed at the bed, put on her boots, took my car keys, and brought my bag in from the car. When she came back, I was lying on top of her bed, on top of the bedspread where Karl and I first did it. I felt very vulnerable there. I couldn’t cry because this little cabin is essentially all one space, divided visually by two walls but no doors. I listened to Grace plunking about in the kitchen where Karl had made me sweet-potato ravioli one night, and cowboy-style chili another. My eyes watered into Grace’s pillows. At one point, I bit into one to stay silent. I kept wondering if she knew. But of course she knew. I’d known about and been able to find the place, hadn’t I? She’d said my name. She’d said she knew who I was. And there was you—the big round proof. I was practically an explosion of boobs and butt and hormones, a
Venus of Willendorf
in comparison to Grace, whose body was like an exoskeleton. She couldn’t
exactly overlook you. You stuck out like an extension on a house.

She continued banging things around in the kitchen. Sharp instruments—I was sure they were sharp—clattered in a tin drawer in the vintage cabinetry. I listened very carefully. And gradually I ceased thinking of Karl at all. I wondered what Grace might do with me. Out here, with no ID, no one knowing where I’d gone, the world in chaos—I’d never be found. There were knives, an axe outdoors to chop up kindling, probably rat poison and other things. Grace worked in television. I recalled Karl telling me she’d worked on some great programs—some truly fine series—but that these days she was supervising a show about murders that had been solved by psychics, because the money was good. I assumed she’d collected all sorts of facts through her crime show—information squirrelled away, both useful and sinister.

Eventually she came around the corner. “I’ve made some nibbles,” she said flatly.

After I struggled to a standing position, she looked me up and down again, as if reminded of your existence. You bulged out from under my shirt, which, in spite of being a blousy thing when I’d bought it six months before, left half my midriff bare when I turned too much. I’d thought the bump was the reason for her kindness, for her offering to let me lie down. But her eyes narrowed, and she turned her back to me and disappeared into the kitchen. You twitched as if you were sending me an SOS signal, but I followed Grace anyway.

We sat at the Formica table and she asked me questions while we ate. We had olives. She put whole olives in her mouth
and pulled them out again as pits, which she laid along one side of her plate. I inspected the sandwich she had made for me, but not having any detective skills aside from a long history of movie-watching, I decided to bite into it. I wasn’t supposed to eat lunch meat while pregnant, but the meat itself was less likely to poison me than Grace was, I decided.

“Karl was your adviser?”

It seemed safe enough to agree.

“How well did you know him?”

I ignored the question and swallowed the first bite of sandwich. I had been working it around my mouth for a full minute, unable to get it down.

“This is very good, thank you. It was a long drive.”

Grace changed tack. “It must have been excruciating to drive with only one good lens. Karl wore glasses, but his night vision … fucking terrible. He just abhorred driving after dark.”

I did know this. He had let me drive the Mini once because of it.

“Let me see,” Grace said, moving her tongue around an olive. She continued working it gingerly as I unfolded my glasses from my face and extended them to her. They shook in my hand. She nimbly held the goggles up. Those glasses were one of my favourite things of all time. I had paid sixty dollars for them in a vintage store and got my optometrist to put my prescription in. The frames reached over the top of my eyebrows and all the way round to the sides of my face. They were brown marbled with pink, and they were cumbersome, perfect for balancing out my generous proportions. My mom
called them my Big City Glasses—long before I went to New York. Grace gazed through the one lens, twisting in her seat. All her movements are stiff, you know, like she’s measuring them.

“I wonder.” Grace got up and stalked away from the table, holding my glasses. She went into the bathroom. “I wonder if they’re close enough to Karl’s prescription for you to wear his …”

I pulled in a breath.

“Oh,” she said from the other room, “I don’t think so. His are much stronger. Like pop bottles.”

She laughed as she came back to me, her hand out. She smiled cunningly, sideways, an olive still pressed in her cheek. She laid Karl’s silver rectangular spectacles on the table between us.

I stared at them. A car passed in the night, down on the road, sounding like an airplane in the silence.

“Take them away,” I squeaked. “Please. You’re upsetting me.”

She expelled an olive pit into her palm and set it on her plate next to the crusts of her sandwich. She had—and has—that uncanny female ability to take bites and chew only when you aren’t looking. She wiped her hand with a butter-coloured napkin. Her eyebrows were shaved off because of the virus, but she raised the bumps of flesh where her eyebrows once were. The drawn-on facsimiles of hair jumped like exclamation points.

“And you don’t think you’re upsetting
me
?”

She swept her own plate off the table and opened a tin garbage pail, and dumped the bits into it. The plate clattered into the sink and she began to scrub it under the faucet.

“Are you going to finish that?” she asked, nodding her angular face at my sandwich.

I remember staring at the curls of shaved turkey. I had taken three bites. Grace swept it off the table and into the old-fashioned refrigerator.

“Did—did you have a service for Karl? What was it like?” I inquired, my eyes falling again on the glasses.

She placed the single washed plate upright in the dish rack and turned back around. “No, of course not. I’ve got him out there in the fucking shed.”

My eyes had started to tear up, and then rivulets ran down my cheeks. I couldn’t help it. You have to understand: I had never thought about encountering Grace all alone. I had assumed the two of them might be there, but then I’d have Karl to smooth the situation. Wasn’t it his situation, really, to deal with—not mine? I felt like I’d shown up to a funeral where the only person I knew was the deceased.

Grace watched me cry. She drew herself up to her full height, kind of indignantly, as if she were disgusted by the show—yet she didn’t look away.

I started to hiccup, and I placed my hand over my mouth because the sound was so loud in this little space it practically reverberated off the hood of the oven and the stone flooring. I clamped my teeth shut and tried to stop, but I couldn’t. My nose ran and I wiped it on my sleeve. The longer Grace looked at me, unmoving, just hovering in that stillness of hers with those icicle eyes, the more I sobbed.

“Of course I buried him,” she finally said, and sat down
in the chrome chair across from me again, pressing her hands to her brow as if I had fatigued her. “My husband. What do you think of me that you believe he wouldn’t have a proper fucking service?”

“The sch—schoo—” I just couldn’t get the words out.

“The school? Not every asshole at that university needs to know just yet. The few who needed to be informed were. It was a private service,” she said more quietly. “I wanted … I want discretion. Some dignity for him.”

She refused to tell me what she meant by that. As long as we sat up, she wouldn’t say anything more about Karl. I couldn’t tell then if his death was truly horrible, or if she wanted it to herself—or both.

Eventually she took his glasses away, but she didn’t bring mine back. I figured they were in the bathroom, or perhaps in the pantry, but when I thought to look for them in the middle of the night while Grace was sleeping, I couldn’t find them.

For the first week or two of our cohabitation, she played little tricks like that, saying and doing things that would completely disable me. But I slept on the sofa anyway, staying because I had to. She was as close to your father as I could get, and I had nowhere else to go.

It’s funny to think I once imagined there might be somewhere safe, somewhere to escape to.

I remember it was after my strange phone call with Larissa, and after I had made the reservation for a rental car, that
Moira reappeared in my life. I was standing behind her at the Dunn Inn, waiting to check out as she was checking in. I wanted to say hi, put out my hand and touch her, but it had been a couple weeks and I didn’t know if she would remember me. She stood very erect, a habit of hers I had forgotten. Her head bobbed when she talked. She leaned forward to fix something that she had missed on the hotel form. Then she turned and saw me.

“Oh … you!” she said. My name had escaped her in the two weeks she’d been gone. She put out her hand to shake, then, looking at me, laughed and clutched me warmly around the neck, my laptop a wedge between our abdomens. I think she hugged me because we were fellow travellers.

“Hazel,” I supplied.

“Yes! Hazel Hayes. I knew that,” Moira said, stepping back. “It was in there somewhere.” She knocked on her head using the leather wallet. “You’re still here.”

“I’m going,” I said. I set my room keys on the counter for Natalie. “I’m driving back today. Through Buffalo, actually.”

“Too bad. I’m playing tonight. It would have been nice to have a familiar face there.” Moira seemed genuinely disappointed.

A boy came in just then, a young guy. He sometimes covered shifts during the day. He dodged between Moira and me without apology and whirled himself into the booth, where he and Natalie began shuffling papers and trading off shifts.

“And things are …?” Moira’s voice trailed off.

“Things are what they are.”

We stood nodding, our heads aglow beneath the spotlight that hung from the ceiling. Then Moira bent and wrapped her fingers around the handle of her music case and picked it up.

“Listen,” I said before she could go. The room key hung from her finger. “What’s the border like?”

She said she wished she could update me, but she was coming from the south. “Good luck,” she said.

I turned, but still didn’t let her go. “Do you go home after this?”

She said she did, the next day, and I asked how she was travelling.

“Bus,” she said, like it was a dirty word.

The boy who had taken over the check-in desk pushed a form at me and asked if I wanted to run it on my card or pay cash. I noticed my room key was still sitting on the counter where I’d set it down. It occurred to me that company on the drive would be a good thing.

I put the money back in my wallet and reclaimed my room key. “I could drive you,” I said to Moira.

On the way to Moira’s show I remember we walked past a big, sleek chain clothing store that had substituted the word
wearing
for
troubling
. Its display proclaimed: M
AKE THE MOST OF WEARING TIMES
. Then we passed a wooden barrier where another ad had been erected, one in which a man and woman dressed in black clothing were stomping around sulkily on a white background, their small shadows thrown behind them,
hunched like chimpanzees. In another image, a man and woman clung to each other, embracing almost desperately, her shirt-tail riding up over one buttock. Every bank of pay phones seemed to have a row of posters for a TV special, its title simply
Emergency
. Men and women in uniforms, holding up cellphones and walkie-talkies, their mouths open, ran toward or sometimes away from explosions. Bodies littered the backgrounds. Flame fluffed like candy floss across the paper sky.

“Were these planned months ahead of time?” I asked. “I know they’re not a response to the outbreak, but …”

Moira was matter-of-fact. “It’s fall.” She shrugged. “Everything’s new.”

I remember she was wearing heels and tight jeans, and with each step she clicked. The day was clear, the late afternoon sun turned bright.

She was right, of course. The television shows were making their debuts, and the ads were for fall and winter fashions though it was still sixty-five degrees outside. As we headed through Washington Square, we dodged a group of students who looked very much like they had just climbed off a bus from some small town, they were all so fresh-faced and starched. The girls wore knee-length plaid shorts and jean skirts, T-shirts that didn’t look as though they’d been washed yet, tiny cardigans it wasn’t cold enough for. They moved slowly, like tourists, then paused, deciding which way to go. A couple of them were wearing wigs. We passed someone in a jaunty hat like TV’s Blossom would have worn, and another girl had a silk turban with a brooch. Hats and scarves seemed
to be everywhere. I saw a girl wearing a flamingo-pink T-shirt that said, in black lettering,
Blondes
still
have more fun
.